States of Mind; You Say You Want a Devolution

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

Published: January 29, 1995

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON—
FOR Newt Gingrich and the band around him, his words are words to live by: "We are committed to getting power back to the states, we are committed to breaking out of the logjam of Federal bureaucrats controlling how we try to help the poor, and we believe you can trust the 50 states and the 50 state legislatures to work together on behalf of the citizens of their states."

It is not government itself that is the enemy, the Speaker and his friends believe; it is central government, national government, Federal Government; if most power devolved back to the states, our problems would end.

Their favorite piece of the Constitution is the 10th Amendment, which provides that "The powers not delegated to the states by the Constitution, nor prohibited to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Classic small-government, Jeffersonian stuff, quite at odds with the Hamiltonian dictum that Congress should provide for "the general welfare."

So on Friday the new ruling class on Capitol Hill pushed through a bill that would make it much harder for Congress to issue instructions to state and local governments without providing the money to pay for them. The Republicans would like to give the states much more responsibility for welfare, hoping that other governors will emulate Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and come up with fresh ideas.

Representative Scott Klug, a Wisconsin Republican, would do away with the kind of Federal regulations that condition Federal funds on the states' pushing the legal drinking age to 21, setting speed limits no higher than 65 and requiring the wearing of seat belts in cars and helmets on motorcycles. And his party would also like to import ideas from the state capitols to Washington, such as balanced budget laws. Democracy's Labs?

But what, one feels compelled to ask, gives the states a special connection to the people, in an era when airlines and interstate highways mean that most Americans cross state borders without thinking about it, whether to pursue their careers or to take a vacation? Are states necessarily wiser? More efficient? More frugal?

"The states," said Gov. Christine Whitman of New Jersey in response to the State of the Union message last week, "are the laboratories of democracy."

In the early days of the nation, states made some kind of geopolitical sense. Virginia was different from Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania was different from Rhode Island. There were obvious regional similarities (South Carolina and Georgia, for example), and there were intrastate tensions (western North Carolina decided to call itself the State of Franklin for awhile), but by and large, each state did represent a kind of community, with shared interests and values.

That is much less true today. Brooklyn and rural Western New York share little beyond the Government, a currency and (up to a point) a language. The suburbs of Atlanta and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. are more similar than downtown Atlanta and suburban Cobb County. Surely it is difficult to say how California clings together, culturally or economically.

States are undeniably smaller than the nation as a whole, and therefore more flexible. Changing policy in Indiana is easier, at least theoretically, than changing it in D.C. There are innovative states (New York, California) and stick-in-the-muds (Texas, Ohio). Some state governments are close to the people, such as Vermont's where there are almost enough legislative seats for everyone, and others are not, such as Arkansas's, about whose traditions of cronyism the nation has learned so much.

But talk shows, faxes, C-Span and CNN mean that most people know a lot more about what goes on in Washington than they used to, and Washington knows more about what they think. What happens in Albany or in Jefferson City, Mo., is still more hidden from public view.

Heretical as it may sound, the Federal Government, for all its failings, attracts far more talented people than most state governments, in both elective and appointive offices. There are obvious exceptions, but most are in the big states -- people like Willie L. Brown Jr., the once and future Assembly Speaker in California, and William Weld, the brainy Republican Governor of Massachusetts.

States don't run deficits, it's true. But many would if they could. They are prevented from doing so by their constitutions, a fact that says more about the drafters of those documents than about the wisdom of modern officialdom.

Americans have always been nervous about lodging too much faith in the central government; the colonists' experiences with the English Crown set a pattern. However, the failure of the Articles of Confederation convinced them that they needed something stronger, and in the Constitution they gave the central government substantial if carefully delineated powers, such as the right to raise money.

For the Republic's first 150 years, state government maintained the predominant role, except in time of war, but the onset of the Great Depression and the New Deal that was designed to combat it, radically altered the balance. For three decades, Washington ran things, largely unchallenged by state capitals.

Largely, but not wholly. In the South, states' rights were put forward as justification for a system of apartheid that denied basic rights to black people. Strom Thurmond, now a Republican Senator, then a Democratic Governor, ran for President in 1948 as the candidate of the States Rights Party. Memories of segregation -- and of Ross Barnett in Mississippi or George Wallace in Alabama confronting the Federal Government over it -- are one reason most liberals cock a wary eye at the idea of devolving power to the states. "States' rights," for them, is encoded racism.

Since the high-water mark of Federal activism, which might be dated to the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the tide has been flowing the other way, slowly at first and now with a rush.

Richard M. Nixon's revenue-sharing program was one early effort. Increasingly, the states became regional franchises of the Federal Government. While ministering to their usual concerns like roads and insurance, and inheriting some, like education, from local governments, state governments had to play mid-level manager for programs like Medicaid.

"The current era," wrote Alice M. Rivlin, now head of the Office of Management and Budget, in her 1992 book, "Reviving the American Dream," "has been called a period of 'competitive Federalism,' meaning the Federal Government and states are competing with each other for leadership in domestic policy." Clinton's Boast

President Clinton has joined the states' cheerleaders, even though it was his party that beefed up the Federal Government in the first place. He boasted in his State of the Union speech Tuesday that "our Administration gave two dozen states the right to slash through Federal rules and regulations to reform their own welfare systems."

Yet the truth is that for all of the talk of decentralization, neither the liberals nor the conservatives wholly trust the states at least not all of them. Welfare reform is a perfect example. Conservatives are worried about giving all the responsibility to the states because they are afraid some won't reform at all. Liberals are worried that some states will reform the system out of existence.

There are other problems, too. In unbridled competition between the states, for example, what would prevent some states from cutting services and taxes to the bone to lure businesses, forcing others to do likewise and creating a downward spiral?

Which takes us right back to colonial days. The Founding Fathers were a committee, after all, and they could never quite resolve the question of how much had to be mandated from the center and how much could safely, from the perspective of the commonweal, be left to the tender mercies of the Federal States. A tough call then, a tough call now.

Drawing.

Correction: February 5, 1995, Sunday An article last Sunday about efforts to put more power in the hands of states, rather than the Federal Government, rendered the 10th Amendment to the Constitution incorrectly. It states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." The article also misstated the date of the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It was 1965, not 1964.